The 2016 Bones & Teeth Gordon Research Conference together with the pre-meeting Gordon Research Seminar will bring together senior and junior investigators who are leaders in a variety of interconnected and interrelated disciplines essential for a comprehensive and encompassing study and understanding of bones and teeth and their acquired and congenital disorders. Great emphasis will be on the junior investigators and trainees who represent the future researchers in these fields. The scientific presentations, formal and informal discussions and poster presentations throughout the Conference are designed to expand the understanding of the genetic, molecular and cellular mechanisms and processes by which bones and teeth develop and are maintained normally, how these processes change during disease and how they have facilitated -and are facilitating- new thinking towards development of effective strategies to treat skeletal diseases and repair or regenerate bones and teeth. Given its format, the Conference provides a forum for extended discussions and conversations, interactions, networking, considerations of novel hypotheses and unmet research needs, and career considerations particularly useful for the young investigators and trainees. The last few years have produced novel, very important and far-reaching discoveries in bone and tooth research, have clarified in ever greater depth the sheer complexity of their biology, structure and function, have identified novel local and systemic regulatory interactions, interplays and circuits, and have unearthed previously unsuspected constituents and players in both tissue health and disease. The 2016 Conference will leverage all these new and important findings and aims to provide the attendees with: a broader appreciation and prospective of the biological and physiological complexity of bones and teeth; tangible and direct examples of therapeutic strategies being tested at the moment; and opportunities for consideration and discussion of future ones. The collegial and cooperative atmosphere that invariably characterizes a Gordon Conference will provide a perfect setting for intellectual development and stimulation and impetus to move the research fields on bones and teeth ahead toward ever greater research achievements and ever more effective disease treatments.